Games & User Experience

A lot of people are talking about games and how the principles behind them enable richer user experiences and more.

“… the gamers' mindset - the fact that they are learning in a totally new way - means they'll treat the world as a place for creation, not consumption. This is the true impact videogames will have on our culture.” –Will Wright, Wired

Putting the Fun in Functional
Games are designed to be fun and engaging, and whenever you can make any system or application more fun you'll likely improve the user experience and get them using the system more regularly and for longer times.

Clues to the Future
Designing a game overlaps heavily with designing information spaces and thus there is much IAs can learn from game design. For example, game sites assume multitasking and are ok with complex interfaces. Games assume you will learn by doing.

Casual Games = Social Software
This passive interaction is key to the gameplay, it’s almost not designed to be addictive, rather, it’s designed to be hard to give up (a thin difference, I admit). How does passive interaction show itself in proper social software? Metadata.

Creating Passionate Users
At SxSW2006 Kathy Sierra talked about bringing the principles behind good game design to software design.